Every country needs one

The death of Ahmad Chalabi, who played a pivotal role in freeing Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, has unleashed a new wave of attacks on him from the usual suspects hoping to re-litigate the wisdom of America’s war in Iraq.

“Remembered for providing false information” is the way a tweet from the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch put it.

As someone who covered Chalabi for a decade, I can say the opposite is true. I’ll remember him for providing the truth.

One example appeared under my byline at the top of the April 16, 2002, issue of the New York Sun. “Free Iraqi Leader Warns of ‘Abysmal’ Planning; Chalabi, in New York, Says American Aid on the Democratic Transition ‘Must Start Right Away’” the headline said.

The article reported on Chalabi’s warning that the Bush administration was, as I paraphrased it, “falling short in the planning for a democratic transition following the ouster of Saddam Hussein.” In Chalabi’s own words, as I quoted them, “the United States is good at military planning. They demonstrated that in the Gulf War. But their record in the political planning in the aftermath of the Gulf War was abysmal. We sense the same spirit now and we warn against the consequences of this ... We don’t want this operation to be set up to fail.”

It was a warning that, unfortunately, proved prophetic.

Educated at MIT and at the University of Chicago, Chalabi yearned to bring to the Middle East the freedom, democracy and rule of law that he enjoyed as a student in America. And while the end of that story has not yet been written, there’s certainly an element of the rebellions against the dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Bashar Assad in Syria that ratifies that view.

A Shiite Muslim, Chalabi was remarkably comfortable with American Jews — not only me, but also others such as Judith Miller and Harold Rhode. I first met Chalabi in the mid-1990s as the Washington correspondent of the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. A series of memorable lunches and dinners at London and New York ensued. Chalabi’s personal example disproved the claim from some extremists on the right that all Arabs or all Muslims were violent haters of Jews, of Israel, or of America.

Chalabi’s goals came in for mockery at times not only from the left but also from the right. George Will quipped, “Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison and John Marshall.”

To me, Chalabi was Iraq’s Samuel Adams, its revolutionary leader who inspired, agitated, persuaded, and persevered in the face of overwhelming odds and when others lost hope.

As for the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times reported in 2014 that “American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs” in Iraq. Moshe Ya’alon, who is now the defense minister of Israel, told me in 2005 that Saddam moved some chemical weapons to Syria before the start of the Iraq war.

To the extent that such weapons are being used still, as they reportedly are, by Bashar Assad in Syria, it only underscores the need for a Chalabi-like figure in the Syrian opposition. Instead, in the absence of such a figure to rally American and congressional support, Syria has endured what the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon recently told NPR amounts to “a slow-motion genocide.”

If each of the world’s dictatorships had a Chalabi — someone inspired by the American example to make it his own life's work to remove the dictator, no matter how great the personal risk or cost — there’d be a lot fewer dictators remaining. Chalabi could have been a math professor; he had a Ph.D. He could have been a banker, and he was, at times in his career.

Instead he devoted his life to his country and to the fight for freedom, and he died not as an exile but as an elected member of the Iraqi parliament. It was a life well lived.